OT: American Politics

Wayward DP said:

I would argue that, at this time, the internal divisions within both Israel and among the Palestinians are such that neither side is actually in a position to pursue meaningful peace.

Just a bloody cluster-**** of a situation that Trump just turned the temperature up on. Not to mention, setting up a US embassy in Jerusalem is a large obstacle to any potential peace process.

Click to expand...

Altair said:

What peace process?

Click to expand...

Wayward DP said:

did you miss the word "potential"?

or is this just for effect?

Click to expand...

zeke said:

the US / britain went and carved out a chunk of the middle east for itself, including the arab world's holiest city, because some people had lived there a thousand years earlier. all while robbing the region of its oil and fomenting permanent war in the region.

no matter what the US says or does, the arab world is never going to just sit there and take it.

Click to expand...

MindzEye said:

Click to expand...

Altair said:

Effect.

Seriously though, every day, every settlement, every rocket, every knife attack, every security operation, just brings the two sides further apart, and no leader is willing (neither population is willing) to concede anything anymore.

It's time to stop doing things with a potential peace process in mind, it's not going to happen anytime soon and life goes on in the meantime.

Click to expand...

When FCC boss Ajit Pai first proposed killing popular net neutrality protections (pdf), he insisted he would proceed "in a far more transparent way than the FCC did" when it first crafted the rules in 2015. That promise has proven to be a historically-hollow one.

Pai's agency is already facing numerous lawsuits for refusing to disclose conversations with ISP lobbyists about the plan to kill net neutrality, refusing to disclose net neutrality complaints filed with the agency, refusing to be transparent about a DDoS attack the FCC apparently concocted to downplay the "John Oliver effect," and for ignoring FOIA requests related to its failure to police website comment fraud during the public comment period.

You'll recall that time and time again, Pai and friends have tried to claim that net neutrality isn't a real problem, and that the harms created by letting giants like AT&T and Comcast run roughshod over an uncompetitive broadband sector are largely hallucinated. As such, the National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request back in May to obtain the 45,000 consumer net neutrality complaints filed since the rules took effect in 2015, arguing that they might just prove useful to the conversation given the FCC's claim that net neutrality isn't a real problem.

Initially the FCC spent much of this year stalling in the release of the complaints, insisting that making them public would be too "burdensome" for agency staff. After growing legal and public pressure, the FCC finally released upwards of 60,000 pages-worth of complaints by consumers who say their ISP behaved anti-competitively in violation net neutrality. But the agency is still refusing to include these complaints in the net neutrality proceeding docket, and refuses to include details on how ISPs responded to these complaints in the docket either:

"The FCC has not produced any additional documents since we filed an Application for Review [on November 14]," NHMC Special Policy Advisor Gloria Tristani told Ars today. Besides carrier responses, "we are missing other documents as well, such as attachments to consumer complaints, consumer rebuttals, etc." The FCC has not explained why it didn't provide those documents, according to the NHMC."

Again, this appears to be par for the course for this FCC. It's fairly clear by now the FCC refused to do anything about the fraud during the comment period because it believed that raising questions about the validity of the comment process would help downplay the massive public opposition to its plan. Similarly, refusing to include real consumer net neutrality complaints in the docket helps prop up Ajit Pai's patently-false claim that net neutrality (which again, is just a symptom of a lack of competition in broadband) isn't a real problem. It's the same MO, repeated over and over and over again.

Needless to say, this entire process has been raising the hackles of fellow agency Commissioners that actually believe that the lack of competition in the broadband mark

Click to expand...

UWHabs said:

But how can you do anything in a region if you don't think there's going to be peace eventually? I understand being pessimistic about when it may occur, but is the goal now to force an all-out conflict? That's about all that this move does.

Click to expand...

zeke said:

Ayman Mohyeldin @AymanM
42s
More fallout from European allies: German Chancellor Angela Merkel says via government spokesman Steffen Seibert that Germany 'does not support' position of the Trump administration on Jerusalem, whose 'status is to be settled as part of negotiations on a 2-state solution.'

Click to expand...

Habsy said:

Foreign countries have no say in where the US puts it's embassies.

Click to expand...

LeafGm said:

That statement isn't about the USA's embassy, it's about their declaration that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.

Click to expand...

LeafGm said:

That statement isn't about the USA's embassy, it's about their declaration that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.

Click to expand...